Last week, 430,000 freshers made their way to university, an event that The Daily Telegraph would normally have marked with a photograph of an 18-year-old exposing a tantalising stretch of midriff as she ferried crockery on to campus, but this time honoured with an article asking famous people to proffer advice to new undergraduates.

It began well. The broadcaster Andrew Marr suggested, astutely, that you should “join almost everything” at university and “try as many new things as you physically can”. The novelist Fay Weldon counselled, soundly, that students should “remember that if you are sober, the conversations will be better”. And the economic commentator Jeff Randall noted, perceptively, that you should “never drink homebrew made by a medic”. But it all began to fall apart with Steve Jones, a professor of genetics, who advised students: “Go to the bloody lectures!” A ridiculous suggestion. I trekked across Cambridge in freezing temperatures, and a misjudged leather jacket, almost daily for three years, and realise now that I could have got the necessary information from books. Or perhaps not bothered at all: no one ever asks what class of degree you got after graduation.

Even worse advice came from the novelist Jeanette Winterson, who told freshers to “remember that these three or four years will change everything that happens next, so take them seriously”. I disagree entirely. It may be socially taboo to say it, but university can be an underwhelming experience; it's not for everyone, and some freshers should not bother with the enterprise.

But before the rant, a caveat: I'm not ungrateful. I was the first person in my family to attend university, among the last in the country not to have to pay tuition fees, received a full grant, enjoyed having time to read plays and novels and made some good friends. Also, university does serve one clear purpose: it contains the damage young adults cause to their reputations while experimenting with dodgy hairstyles, bad poetry and left-wing politics. But if I were 18 now, I'd probably give the whole thing a miss.

Why? First, there's the problem of academia. Of course, not all specialised knowledge and debate is petty and pointless. It's probably good, for instance, that a medic understands the difference between giardiasis and cholecystitis, and that a mathematician can tell his linear algebra from his multivariable calculus. But when it comes to the humanities and arts subjects it often is. “Does John Milton infuse new significance into the concept of 'history' in his poetry?” It doesn't matter. “Would you agree that for Alexander Pope, confinement often turns out to be liberation?” Who cares? “Discuss the role and nature of seclusion in Emily Dickinson's work.” Oh come on. No one needs to dwell on this kind of stuff to understand English literature. Exams are even more pointless: all they do is test short-term memory and patience. It's been a decade since I sat my last paper, and in the meantime have suffered bereavement, had my heart broken and witnessed the horrifying revival of Noel Edmonds's TV career, but still the thing I have nightmares about most often is sitting my finals.

This would be tolerable if student social life provided a thrilling counterbalance to the work, but it doesn't. It is supposed to teach you how to be independent, but I felt freer as a teenager - at the college I attended, everything from housing to food was carefully organised, the bar closed at 8pm during exam time and we weren't allowed TVs in our rooms. At least at home I could walk across the lawn. Your university years are also supposed to be a time when you meet fascinating people from an array of interesting backgrounds, and I must have done - but most of us were still trying to work out who we were and, frankly, everyone was too drunk to communicate.

Indeed, the biggest problem with student culture, as the controversy over initiation ceremonies showed last week, is that it is a monoculture, one fuelled by booze and an obsession with being ironic. For many, our university years are just an alcoholic blur of tedious arguments over the division of restaurant bills, “humorous” reminiscing over Postman Pat and sitting, drunk, in people's bedrooms listening to other drunkards using words that they don't really understand to spout ill-informed opinions about things that don't matter. This tedium is why student life has inspired so few novels. Yes, we have the genre of the campus novel, and there's Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, of course, and the highly entertaining comic novel Starter for Ten by David Nicholls, but otherwise students are usually marginal characters in fiction.

The blankness might be worth enduring if university enhanced your career prospects, as it probably did in my case, but this is often no longer the case. The Government's desire to increase university participation to 50 per cent has diluted the cachet of the word “graduate”, and even before the recent economic turmoil, the Association of Graduate Recruiters was giving warning that the graduate earnings premium - the extra amount that people can expect to earn if they go to university - was shrinking. Separately, a recent study by the Institute of Education found that some degrees were worthless, with male graduates in arts and humanities earning no more than those who left education after A levels. And last weekend this newspaper reported that the class of 2008 faces unprecedented levels of debt (it is not unusual for graduates to owe more than £30,000) and is struggling to find jobs as the credit crunch takes hold.

Let's hope that the expense of going to university forces people to be more realistic. But if I had my way I would, with the exception of the sciences and disciplines such as engineering and maths, raise the starting age to 30. This would restore the value of the word “graduate” and encourage people to accumulate useful skills that the country actually needs or to attend university at a time of life when they would perhaps drink less and have something to say for themselves.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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